Breathes new life and beauty into a PS1 favorite!

• Overall Score: 4/5

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I was thrilled when I found out that the game would be remastered on PC! It remains a favorite to this day - but I recognize that it's not for everyone. Legend of Mana was always flawed, and this remaster does little to fix most of those flaws, for better or for worse.

- Plot/Writing/Quests: The plot remains intact with minor changes to the script. There are 3 main quest paths and a big handful of (68) side-quests. Since nearly all of the quests are short (they can be completed in 30 minutes or less), this keeps the narrative at large from feeling like there's much of an overarching plot. Don't get me wrong - it's there, but parts are kind of blink-and-you-miss-it. At worst, it makes the ending seem pretty hollow, but Legend of Mana has a New Game+ feature that seems to make it fit. In spite of that, Legend of Mana's writing is one of its biggest strengths. I like to think of how much fun the localization must have been; it's top-notch, with a great sense of humor and a whimsy throughout that doesn't detract from its emotional scenes and heavy themes.

- Combat: Once you get used to a few things, it's pretty easy. Most attacks happen in two directions - back and forth - except area-of-effect spells and specials. Movement in-combat can feel choppy (slight delay between steps) and lining up hits on the right plane with some enemies can be tricky. Timing specials and spells also takes practice, since they have a charge time during which enemies can move out of range. Stun-locking is possible, with little practice timing regular attacks well enough that you can kill most enemies (including bosses) without them having a chance to hit you. This makes the majority of the game a breeze even at high difficulties. That said, enemies can do it to you and your companions, too.

The game doesn't hold your hand, but for most players there's no real need; essentials are easy to figure out, and you can play through without paying any attention to most of its features. There are no tutorials (save a few vague dialogues near the beginning), but there's a set of encyclopedias in the study of your Home with varying degrees of usefulness (and humor). That's it.

Systems include:

- Customizable map: Pick a square from the large world map, and on that square, choose where to place artifacts you obtain throughout your journey. Where you place these artifacts determines things from the level of enemies you encounter to the elemental affinities of that zone - with little to no explanation in-game as to how or what this is for. Not knowing (or being able to figure it out) can limit some of the content you encounter, including quests.

- Produce: Pretty easy: give the talking tree in your backyard some seeds, and in a few days, it'll grow some produce for you. There's at least some rhyme and reason to which seeds might grow which foods, but there's also a whole lot of randomness to it. This also goes for the seeds that the tree might give you when you come to harvest. This is really important for raising pets with optimal attributes, and (to a lesser degree), tempering, so the randomness can be frustrating and time-consuming.

- Pets: You can raise pets from a slew of encounters from ten categories. You can feed them foods like meat you pick up after combat or fruit you grow in the orchard. Problem is, you only have room for five pets, so you need to pick and choose favorites...somehow.

- Golems: Golems are like pets, but potentially even more awesome. However, they're so expensive and somewhat-tied-in to the even-more-confusing forging/tempering system, that I haven't experimented much with them and have precious little to say about them.

- Magic/Instruments: Magic is my least favorite part of the game. In order to be able to cast spells, you need to craft instruments. In order to make instruments, you need base materials (which affect the outcome, but this isn't documented anywhere ingame) and elemental coins that are...obtained from elemental spirits that you play music for...using the instruments that you craft using the coins that you need. Thankfully, getting coins is usually pretty easy (though occasionally frustrating for several reasons including the randomness of spirit encounters), so the real "problem" is the spells, themselves. I've not found a single spell that can compete with pretty much any weapon special, rendering them and all their pretty-flashy-neat-sounding effects kind of moot.

- Weapon/Armor Forging/Tempering: Simultaneously the most-accessible and least-understandable crafting system. The most-obvious part is crafting stuff from strong/rare materials. This usually gets a base item of generally-expected beginning quality, which may or may not be better than random items you've already picked up. Tempering is another beast, and can be so vastly expansive that without a guide, you'll need a good memory or good notes; you can temper weapons/armor with anything from claws and bones to fruit and meat, and they don't always make items better - at least, not always clearly. It can be a long, expensive, and frustrating process, but can yield the most satisfying results when you discover its patterns.

...and then there's Ring-Ring Land, a Pocketstation (think Tamagotchi-style) minigame that was originally Japan-only. There's no ingame explanation besides that it exists. There are a handful of unique items to be had from it. Problem is, you'll have to play it and figure everything out yourself.

A remaster like this could have improved the game (larger stables, additional documentation for crafting systems, improved hitboxes, a last zone/final boss that aren't so short/disappointingly-easy...) and make is more widely-accessible, but some would undoubtedly have crimped on the game's charm. All-in-all, it's a fun return to a nostalgic landscape with mostly-fantastic updates that leave only the pickiest players (like me) wanting more.

• In-Game Purchases: None
  
• Learning Curve: Medium-easy; the crafting systems, however, are another story.
  
• Replayability: Medium-high. The story never really changes, but depending on your choices, you can see more (or potentially less) of it.
  
• Recommended Purchase Price: $15

A welcome trip down memory lane and a fantastic re-introduction to a series that somehow changed my life.

• Overall Score: 3/5 (+1 for nostalgia)

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Final Fantasy has been a part of my life for decades, and the original Final Fantasy forged a big part of my identity as a gamer (whatever that even means). I fondly remember taking turns playing it on a crappy old television with a loose antenna adapter in a hot garage in the middle of the summer with my friend Mike as we pored over the Nintendo Power guide he'd gotten in the mail. I remember leaving the game on just to listen to the music in Matoya's Cave, because it was oddly magical and inspired me to keep writing my ripoff mashups of The Hobbit and The Legend of Zelda in my math notebook so I could submit a story for Young Authors. Final Fantasy - perhaps especially this one - is a weirdly-large part of my story, and I'll never forget it.

This Pixel Remaster version is pretty fantastic. Graphics are updated about on-par with mid-life SNES aesthetics, the soundtrack is remastered and (with a couple exceptions) remains fantastic, and the sound effects are actually great to boot.

Story content has been re-translated and augmented to offer a more coherent tale in a game that was previously lacking. It doesn't make the story good (groundbreaking as it may have been for the medium at the time), but it's a definite improvement that helps it age more gracefully.

It's easier - remarkably, drasticly easier - but this works for modern audiences and (especially) newcomers.

Despite the streamlined gameplay, we lose the original game's unique(-for-the-time) strategy element. In the original game, players would need to acquaint themselves with the strength of each enemy and enemy formation and their own party's relative strength to optimize performance, otherwise attacks would miss; for example, setting the entire 4-man party to attack one target, then the target dying after the first or second hit, would result in the subsequent attacks missing because the target was gone. Frustrating as this mechanic was, it made being mindful of each encounter a necessity, and even made some random encounters ostensibly more difficult than some of the bosses! I thought it was pretty cool, and it would have been neat for this to be a toggle-able option in the remaster. This also means that mindlessly auto-battle to fast-grind levels beyond necessity for any upcoming encounters is super easy (barely an inconvenience), making the latter parts of the game of questionable difficulty at best. Sadly, the Peninsula of Power does not exist in this version; given the ease at which you can grind, though, it doesn't really need to.

Thankfully, community-generated challenges will always exist. Despite my little tirade, it's a minor complaint.

Final Fantasy will always have a special place in my heart, and the Pixel Remaster is a great way to revisit it; perhaps it lacks the original's challenge, but it's also sans the inherent frustrations those challenges brought.

• In-Game Purchases: None
  
• Learning Curve: Easy; much easier than the original game!
  
• Replayability: Medium-low. The only replay value is in experiencing the game with different party configurations, which can change the way you play parts of the game pretty drastically (albeit less so than in the original version).
  
• Recommended Purchase Price: ~$10. Depending on how attached you are to owning the game in the first place, it's still a remaster of a (now) 35-year-old game with a lack of options to vary the experience.